Dan

Calabrese

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December 24, 2007

The ‘War on Christmas’: Just What James Dobson Always Wanted

Focus on the Family has never seen a pointless war it wouldn’t wage.

So the purported War on Christmas was made for Dr. James Dobson’s crew. Jesus Christ overturned the moneychangers’ tables and excoriated them for turning God’s house into a den of thieves. Dobson just wants the thieves to wish you a Merry Christmas.

Focus on the Family is compiling a list of what it calls the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (original they are not) – a recounting of major retailers grouped by how willing they are to actually utter the C word during the Season of Shopping. Limiting your greeting to a mere “Happy Holidays” will get you tarred as a retail uglophile.

You better watch out, you’d better not cry Happy Holidays, or else Dobson will show up on “The O’Reilly Factor” and declare you to be on the list!

And in a wonderful piece of irony, Dobson is pimping an organization selling buttons that read “It’s OK, Wish Me A Merry Christmas™.” Yes, you read correctly – there is a trademark symbol there. The Christmas battlefield – and it’s Dobson who wants the battle – is between combatants who will whisk their intellectual property off to Egypt in the dead of night lest Herod’s minions show up to violate it.

Christmas is diluted enough for Christians – without those who purport to be Christian leaders engaging in such ridiculous controversies. Let’s back up for a second.

Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ – the son of God who gave up his place in Heaven and took on human form so he could take the sins of the world upon himself, and 33 years later be nailed to a cross with those sins in the ultimate victory over both sin and death.

There is only one Christian way to celebrate that, and that is to reflect upon the lordship of Christ and offer, or reaffirm, your commitment to him. If you want to give gifts, have parties, dress up as Santa Claus and get drunk on egg nog spiked with rum and cognac, go right ahead. But it has nothing to do with Jesus or Christmas.

So what does Dobson think he is accomplishing by threatening secular retailers with bad publicity if they don’t enunciate the name of Christ’s holiday? If store managers all across America start telling people Merry Christmas because they don’t want to end up on Dobson’s ugly list and lose sales from those who inexplicably follow the man’s lead, will that glorify God and celebrate Christ?

Not in the slightest, but it sure would make the point about how influential James Dobson is. This is what happens to Christians when they start trying to battle the secular world in an effort to make life in America look and sound more Christian. If you win any kind of victory at all, it’s a hollow one.

The people who run major retailers have one objective, and that’s to make as much money as possible. I’m sure there are many Christians within their ranks, but their institutions are not set up to glorify God. They’re set up to serve the bottom line. So any Christian who expects these retailers to become the conduit for God’s message to the world is asking for a disappointment.

But this is what you get when you allow what has happened to Christmas. The essence of the holiday is peaceful and calm. A child born in a manger to redeem the world. Sit back, breathe easy and consider the beauty and the wonder of this proposition. But somewhere along the line, the Christian world seems to have decided that we will “win” whatever we’re trying to win if we get more and more people to celebrate “our” holiday, so we embraced new elements that appealed more to the population at large – like materialism, huge retail profits, soaring credit card balances, drunken office parties and some fat guy who breaks into your house and eats your cookies.

Christmas has turned into a fiasco on our watch, and now self-appointed “Christian leaders” like James Dobson act scandalized because the secular world, in the course of joining in, isn’t saying the magic word.

Here’s a better idea. Let those who focus on the non-Christ aspects of Christmas have “Happy Holidays” and “Seasons Greetings” if they want. They can even stick a trademark symbol on it for all I care. And those who only want to glorify Jesus Christ can keep Christmas.

Then if James Dobson wants to wander into retail stores and harangue their managers for the way they greet people, he will get no attention for doing so – which will guarantee, of course, that his first such action will be his last.

This is Column # DC137.  Request permission to publish here.